Legends Among Legends

Jack of All Trades: Renee Montgomery

BY AJ McCord

There does not appear to be a lane in which two-time WNBA champion Renee Montgomery is not confidently making her mark. 

Fashion? Montgomery launched C-Suite 21, a clothing line designed to fill in the gaps for athletes who need to be as comfortable and confident in a board room as they are in their field of play.

Entertainment? Check out ThinkTank Productions, Montgomery’s production company. Their mission is to invest in and showcase stories of underrepresented voices. 

Sports? In case her own WNBA titles and NCAA championship aren’t enough, the co-owner of the Atlanta Dream made history when she joined the ownership group in 2021, becoming the first WNBA player to move into league ownership. She’s also a co-owner of the FCF Beasts, a professional indoor football team in the Fan Controlled Football League. 

Kids? The Renee Montgomery Foundation invests in the next generation by promoting equality in women’s sports and advocating for social justice. They give out multiple Last Yard scholarships every year to HBCU (historically black colleges and universities) student-athletes to help level the playing field. 

“I’m Renee Montgomery, and I like to make things better,” Montgomery said, just days before she joined her Unrivaled commentary team for the league’s inaugural season.

“That’s what I think of when I go into any situation. I’m a student of every game that I play. Whether it’s the fashion industry, whether it’s the TV, film, and production industry, whether it’s the sports industry, I study.” 

A lifelong student of the game of basketball, Montgomery is systematically, and intentionally, applying the lessons she honed on the court to everything outside of it. 

“It’s a certain level of discipline,” Montgomery explains about how she tackles everything all at once. “It started young for me.” 

Montgomery grew up with her parents and sisters in Saint Albans, West Virginia, whose population was just over 10,000 in the 2020 census. It’s the town where her parents, Bertlela (AKA Snook) and Ron, met at West Virginia State University, a historically black college. 

“Being from West Virginia, sometimes I felt like I don’t know if the coaches would be able to come down here and see me as much as they will see the New York players or the California players or the Georgia players, so I knew that every moment had to count, especially when I’m playing AAU.”

That discipline helped Montgomery catch the attention of legendary University of Connecticut head coach Geno Auriemma. In her four years with the Huskies, Montgomery was named a two-time All-American, won the Nancy Lieberman Award (given to the best point guard in the country annually) as a senior, and led the 2009 team to an undefeated season and national championship. 

“At every turn, I was playing in a big pond,” Montgomery reflected. “I’m in the pond of UConn and I’m still undersized, and then when I’m about to get drafted, that’s the first thing they’re talking about; our team went undefeated my senior year, but they’re curious can I make it in the WNBA because of my size.”

It’s the discipline she practiced relentlessly and saw the results of that kept her grounded whenever there were doubts. 

“The idea of seeing discipline be successful, I think, is also something people may not talk about as much,” she said. “You can be disciplined, but why do you continue to be disciplined? Because I saw it work. I saw the fruits of my labor in a sense of, ‘Man, I worked on my ball-handling so much and so when it was a big game, I had zero turnovers – let me go work on it some more.’”

Discipline in basketball showed in tangible, statistical categories. As she’s moved into the business world, Montgomery says the results aren’t necessarily as easy to track – but they’re no less certain. 

“I try to align with things I’m passionate about,” Montgomery explained in terms of her portfolio. “For all the things that you [see me doing] doing, there were a lot of things I had to say no to.”

The confidence to know what to green light and what to pass on as a businesswoman is derived from the same discipline that gave her confidence in big games as a player. 

“When we say things in sports like ‘trust the process,’ we know what that means. People might think ‘trust the process’ and believe that it means everything’s going to be alright in the end, [but] that’s not necessarily what I think of when I think of ‘trust the process’ as an athlete. I think that the season is long, you’re going to take a lot of Ls,” she explained.

“I’ve had years where I didn’t win the championship, I’ve had years where we had losing seasons [and] we lost more games than we won. But I’ve also had years where I won, and I’ve also had years where we were successful. So trusting the process doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be successful at that very moment, it just means that if you keep working at this pace and you keep staying this focused and you keep doing all the things right things, it will probably work out better than not. 

“You’re putting yourself in the best position to win. There are some great players that have never won championships, but they’re still great players and they still trust the process and they still were successful – maybe not winning the ultimate championship, but success looks different in a lot of different ways. When you trust the process, you gotta check the wins along the way and that’s what I be sure to do.”

Montgomery is in the process of checking those wins now. 

C-Suite 21 successfully launched its first collection, ensuring that 90% of C-Suite executives who play a sport have luxury comfort. 

“I’m excited about C-Suite21 because I felt that gap when I went from athlete to retired and instantly was inside the corporate world and sitting in meetings. Now, even sitting alongside Larry [Gottesdiener, managing partner of the Dream], he’s a billionaire, so I’m excited that I filled a gap in the clothing where I want to be comfortable – I’m still an athlete –  but I’m also now a businesswoman and doing business at a high level.”

The Dream are coming off a season in which they became just the second team in WNBA history to sell out all 20 home games, including two games of more than 17,000 fans in State Farm Arena. 

“I’m excited about the Atlanta Dream in the sense of how things are growing in the WNBA and how our ownership group is moving alongside with that,” Montgomery said.

ThinkTank Productions is in the midst of finalizing projects and deals that will be announced soon. 

As for the Reneee Montgomery Foundation, it is continuing to give back to the community she was raised in. 

“One thing I’ll never leave is the community because I was raised on it,” said Montgomery. “We try to provide Last Yard scholarships to those student-athletes to help them be able to compete at their highest level and reach their potential and use those scholarship checks for nutrition, for food, so they don’t have to work a job while they’re playing.” 

And so Montgomery continues, in every lane she touches, to make things just a little bit better. 

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